A day of wet-weather-exploring.

Wednesday we had heard there might be less hiking-friendly weather, so we picked a set of activities to pass the time that we thought would do well even if it were raining, which wound up being a very good decision.

First, we headed across the island to Skye Skyns, which is a tannery for sheep-hide!  They are trying to maintain a lot of the traditional tannery practices while minimizing the negative environmental elements as much as possible.

During the summer they also operate a "tea yurt" cafe, where we had a fantastic lunch (Mushroom soup, Stilton and Mushroom Quiche, and a scone with "crowdie" (farmer's cheese) and a really delicious chutney.) and then got a tour of the tannery.

 

The actual Tannery operation (where I forgot to take any pictures, sorry!) was a really cool collection of optimizations, some parts were very modern and some were much older -- their "tumbler" for example, which was  originally powered by a water wheel, was 120 years old.  They were putting a lot of work to doing the job as sustainably and with as little damage to the local environment as possible, which was really neat to see.  Also, as a kid who grew up with a mimosa tree in his front yard, it was neat to find out that in place of oak bark, they use mimosa bark as the soaking agent in the tanning process, now!

I briefly considered buying a beautiful and comically expensive jacket I would almost never wear, and then we headed off for our next stop, Skye Weavers!

Rachel's mother had recommended this charming little wool and tweed weaving operation -- a two person storefront where the looms are hooked up to be run by pedal power!

 We had a nice chat with the owners and wandered through their lovely shop (where I resisted the urge to buy a vest) and then headed off to Castle Dunvegan!  

The Castle Dunvegan is the Seat of the chief of Clan Macleod, and is a well-maintained fortified structure with some really impressive artifacts -- as well as a flag which, legend has it, was given to the Macleods by fairies and, if raised, assures them victory in battle.

A very clever desk calendar and some very pretty leatherwork on this book binding.

Texture of the Fairy Flag.  Historians tell us that the Fairies had cloth weaving abilities very similar to Damascus and Syria circa 400AD.

There was a very particular painting that a few of my readers might recognize. . .  Amazing to stumble across him here.

The people who curate Castle Dunvegan also really enjoy jump-scaring their visitors, and have created a couple of different opportunities using wax figures (one a barefoot servant on a set of very dark stairs, another a captive who has been tossed into the castle's (legitimately horrifying) dungeon.  They have an excellent sense for what combination of blind angle, darkness, and distance is likely to startle a person the most, and it was really amusing to be so startled, and then be able to linger for a few minutes and watch it happen to the next handful of people who walked through the area in the exact same way.

 Oh, what's up this mysterious dark stairway?

 

FEAR, that's what.

 Oh, one other delightful discovery at Dunvegan.  Rachel pointed out to me this portrait, on account of its incredible choice to include such dramatic and lurid detail about the death of its subject.

 What a choice.

It was raining pretty heavily as Castle Dunvegan was closing (around 17:30) so further exploration of the outdoors wasn't really practical, and also, neither of us had taken the time to have a Scotch yet, so we made our way up to Uig, a ferry town partway back to our Airbnb, and grabbed a drink in the local restaurant just across from the ferry pier.

Rachel had a Smokehead, which was, as one might imagine, very smokey, and I had a Raasay (Pronounced almost like "Rah-zee"), which is a local-to-Skye distillery, which is, according to the internet, new, but a local was excited to tell us that apparently they were making Scotch in a distillery there for a hundred years before finally getting licensed in the mid-teens.
 
The Raasay was delicious.  I'll definitely be seeing if I can fit a bottle of that in my bag on the trip home, if I can find some in Edinburgh.

We had a few odds and ends to finish at the house, and I had made a comment about getting stopped in customs during the day, which is how I had discovered that Rachel had never seen the movie French Kiss?  Which is wild, for someone who has been dating me as long as she has.
So we got a copy of that queued up and settled in to wait for the storm to blow over, while we watched Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline cavort across France.